Tag: auto shopping

A recent study has revealed that 70 percent of car shoppers using YouTube are influenced by what they see.

A new report has now been issued that provides insight into trends with regards to mobile marketing and video advertising and the impact this is having on the decisions being made by car buyers.

The report is based on YouTube data, Google search data and results from the 2015 Google/TSN Auto Shopper Study.

It also included the data produced as a result of a Milward Brown Digital commissioned study conducted by Google based on the auto shopping consumer sales funnel. Overall, this revealed that digital and mobile marketing played a considerable role in influencing the decisions made by car buyers as 70 percent of people who use YouTube had been influenced by video content when they made their auto purchasing choices.

The report provided a number of important pieces of insight into online and mobile marketing trends in car buying.

Among the highlights of the report were the following:

• 70 percent of people who use YouTube in the vehicle purchasing process said that the video content they saw had an impact on the choices they decided to make.
• The average car buyer made only two visits to dealerships before making their decision.
• 60 percent of vehicle buyers start the shopping process without knowing which car they actually intended to buy.
• Mobile searches taking place from within the actual dealership lots had risen by 46 percent over the 12 months prior to the study.

Though this data aligned with the predictions that have been made within the auto industry with regards to the influence of mobile advertising, search and video content, it is interesting to see the speed at which consumers are adopting digital methods of informing themselves and are reducing the number of visits they are actually making to a dealership before deciding on the vehicle and purchasing method they intend to use.

What is now being found is that many of the most important influences on consumers come from micro moments when mobile marketing has the greatest influence. It is at those moments that shoppers take out their mobile devices in order to learn an additional piece of information instead of going to a salesperson directly.

The internet has already altered the car shopping experience and smartphones have gone a step further.

A recent study conducted by Autoshopper has revealed that more than one in every three people who use the internet to shop for vehicles such as cars, SUVs and trucks, have conducted a mobile search on a smartphone or tablet while actually standing in a dealership.

That represents an increase of a massive 29 percent over the number of people who were doing it in 2013.

Considering the trend toward mobile search, that really doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, earlier in 2015, searches over smartphones and tablets surpassed those that took place over PCs, according to statistics released by Google. It was that trend that brought about the massive wave nicknamed “mobilegeddon” in which Google – and then later, Bing – changed their algorithms in order to favor websites that were mobile friendly, when a search was conducted over mobile devices.

Now, dealerships are paying close attention to mobile search, as it is having a considerable impact on sales.

Since Google results now favor mobile friendly websites, dealerships have discovered that if they want to be able to stand out to their customers, then this is the type of experience that they are going to have to provide. After all, the last thing that they want to do is have a potential customer standing on their showroom floor while discovering the offerings of a competitor on their smartphones because that rival had a mobile friendly website and therefore received better search results.

Of course, the experience goes far beyond search. As dealerships battle over customers, they are now trying to create a far more seamless experience between the device and shopping in person, so that the two will work together.

Not only are most dealership websites already highly optimized for mobile search, they are also designed to provide a much broader experience that will allow consumers to be able to view additional resources that will help them to make their decisions and to learn what they want to know about the vehicles that they are considering.